Inside the Star

Behind the Wheel

Perhaps, Rob Dickinson has come to concede, the slow wind-up of his post-Catherine Wheel career isn't such a bad thing. It has, mind you, taken him a bit longer than planned to begin emerging from the shadow of the underrated East Anglia, U.K., prog-shoe-gazer quartet he led for 10 years until 2000, when a combination of audience indifference and creative exhaustion drove the band to an early retirement.

Perhaps, Rob Dickinson has come to concede, the slow wind-up of his post-Catherine Wheel career isn't such a bad thing. It has, mind you, taken him a bit longer than planned to begin emerging from the shadow of the underrated East Anglia, U.K., prog-shoe-gazer quartet he led for 10 years until 2000, when a combination of audience indifference and creative exhaustion drove the band to an early retirement.

After labouring on and off on his own material for several years, Dickinson finally released an amicable collection of mature, romantic guitar-rock anthems called Fresh Wine for the Horses in 2005. It drew generally decent reviews but the looming collapse of his label, Sanctuary Records, effectively drove the album from sight. Enter friend and Canadian uber-producer Bob Ezrin, who helmed the Catherine Wheel's 1997 disc Adam and Eve. He felt strongly enough that Fresh Wine deserved another go-'round that he passed the record along to Universal Music Canada boss Randy Lennox last year. While away on holiday, the entire Lennox clan fell in love with it and now, although "the slow-turning wheels of the record industry" have taken 12 months to make it so, Dickinson's solo debut is about to get a second lease on life with a forthcoming, worldwide release on Universal.

"I don't know what shape it's gonna be in," says the genial Dickinson from his adopted home of Los Angeles. "We're gonna try to figure that out. We might add some new songs – obviously I've been writing over this period and there's a big backlog of songs to maybe record. But part of me knows and intuitively feels that there's unfinished business with Fresh Wine, and I know we're gonna do what we can to give it a second chance."

That Dickinson's salvation should come from Canada is quite appropriate, since the Catherine Wheel generally sold more records and played to bigger crowds in this country than it ever did in the States or its native Britain. The band was one of the marquée acts on Our Lady Peace's Summersault festival tour several years ago, alongside the Foo Fighters and Smashing Pumpkins. Indeed, during the Happy Days/Adam and Eve-era the band was a near-constant presence on MuchMusic and 102.1FM.

Dickinson isn't lying, then, when he says Toronto is "very dear to my heart" and enthuses about the opportunity to hang about here for a few days of industry wheeling-and-dealing after his solo show at Lee's Palace on Monday.

"I think there's something in the Canadian psyche which gets more esoteric, European music, especially certain types of English rock bands, more so than America," he says. "It all struck us very solidly at the time when we first came over to Canada, having spent the past couple of days in Detroit, how different and how, dare I say it, more sophisticated the Canadian people were. I'm don't want to insult my American neighbours, but that was always indicative of the band doing well there."

It was a surprise, Dickinson says, to see audiences going berserk for Catherine Wheel standards like "Black Metallic" during his initial run of live dates for Fresh Wine for the Horses.

That, combined with recent conversations with fannish members of Death Cab for Cutie and Interpol – who told an awed Dickinson that "without Chrome, our second record, their band wouldn't exist" – has given him a renewed appreciation for his time in Catherine Wheel.

Rather than lamenting the perceived failure of the band to reach the mass audience that many fans and critics maintain it deserved and dwelling on the record-company pressures to become "the next Pink Floyd" that killed his enthusiasm for making music at the end of the 1990s, Dickinson is now rather enjoying his "neglected elder statesman" status.

"I'm starting to appreciate that," he says. "It is kind of cool. We were the band that didn't quite make it but that everyone still loves, and in many ways it doesn't get much better than that. I'm not living in a castle in Spain with the proceeds, but it's still pretty good.

"I've been talking with Brian (Futter, the band's old guitarist) recently. We're slowly getting our heads around maybe getting a `best of Catherine Wheel' disc together. We're all still friends and we've never really ruled out the chance of doing something together as a band again.

"But I think our arc of creativity had definitely – certainly at that period – reached a peak back in 2000 when we decided to call it a day, and I don't think any of us regret going our separate ways. But our manager at the time coined the phrase: `This band is parked, rather than split up.' So I always like to think that the band has just pulled into a rest area and is just resting."

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